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Heat Budget Terms of Reference

The overall goal of the "Consistency between planetary energy balance and ocean heat storage" (CONCEPT-HEAT) Research Focus is to bring together seven climate research communities all concerned with the energy flows in the Earth’s System to advance on the understanding of the uncertainties through budget constraints:

Atmospheric radiation

Air-sea-fluxes

Ocean Heat Content

Ocean reanalysis

Atmospheric reanalyses and NWP

Climate models

Global sea level

This CLIVAR research focus has the main objective to build up a pluri-disciplinary synergy community for climate research aiming to work on two different issues:

1) Quantify Earth’s energy imbalance, the ocean heat budget, and atmosphere-ocean turbulent and radiative heat fluxes, their observational uncertainty, and their variability for a range of time and space scales using different observing strategies (e.g., in-situ ocean, satellite), reanalysis systems, and climate models.

2) Analyze the consistency between the satellite-based planetary heat balance and ocean heat storage estimates, using data sets and information products from global observing systems (remote sensing and in situ) and ocean reanalysis, and compare these results to outputs from climate models to obtain validation requirements (for model and observations).